From NY Times columnist Roger Cohen:

Beyond Iraq, beyond the economy, beyond health care, there was something even more fundamental at stake in this U.S. election won by Barack Obama: the self-respect of the American people.

For almost eight years, Americans have seen words stripped of meaning, lives sacrificed to confront nonexistent Iraqi weapons and other existences ravaged by serial incompetence on an epic scale. . . .

Or put another way, quoting E.E. Cummings (via Philip Roth's Indignation):

Olaf (upon what were once knees)

does almost ceaselessly repeat

"there is some shit I will not eat"

On November 4^th, we were all (or at least 52.6% of us) Olaf.